BuzzFeed boss passes the BBC sneer test

LONDON — One of the first questions Janine Gibson was asked by her boss when she arrived at BuzzFeed News a year ago was how she would measure success journalistically.

Gibson’s litmus test? When John Humphrys, the notoriously cranky presenter of Today, the BBC Radio 4 breakfast show that sets the daily conversation for Britain’s political establishment, cited a BuzzFeed story without sneering.

It didn’t take long.

A series of weighty, worthy investigations since Gibson’s eye-catching move from the Guardian last September has established the American as a player in British news. If not yet considered at the top table, BuzzFeed is at least no longer ridiculed as merely a site for viral listicles. And that’s no small feat in a market crowded with newspapers, broadcasters and digital publishers competing for scoops and readers.

“We’ve gone through that trajectory slightly faster than I thought,” Gibson told POLITICO. “We’re going to need some more goals.”

On Monday, Gibson, editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed U.K., delivered a presentation about the news operation to an audience of advertising professionals in London. She highlighted a handful of investigative scoops BuzzFeed has published under her editorship.

From scoop to exit

During Monday’s presentation, Gibson couldn’t resist pointing out that she’s a character in Oliver Stone’s new movie about Edward Snowden, which premiered at the London Film Festival last weekend.

It was a reminder that her career hasn’t gone exactly as planned.

Gibson joined the Guardian in the late 1990s as a media reporter and rose to be one of its most senior editors. In 2013, she was running the Guardian’s New York newsroom when it broke the Snowden leaks — arguably the biggest scoop in the newspaper’s history, which resulted in the first Pulitzer Prize for a British publication. When Gibson returned to the Guardian’s London office the next year, it was widely presumed that she would take over from Alan Rusbridger and become the paper’s first female editor-in-chief.

Instead, Gibson failed to win the backing of the staff and Katharine Viner was appointed editor-in-chief. Gibson decided not to stick around, and left the Guardian in May 2015. She joined BuzzFeed three months later.

Tasked by BuzzFeed’s bosses with adding journalistic heft to its entertainment output, Gibson went on a recruitment drive. Among her first hires was Stuart Millar, the Guardian’s head of news, who became her number two. “We’ve pretty much doubled the editorial team in a year,” Gibson said. It now stands at around 80 and has outgrown the existing office space, near London’s Oxford Street.

The London office will expand into larger premises next year. As part of that move, BuzzFeed will build two new dedicated studios for producing video clips, in keeping with a broader push to produce more video content to appeal to advertisers. “We have tweaked our emphasis slightly,” Gibson said.

BuzzFeed’s long-term prospects were the subject of much debate in the U.S. earlier this year, after the Financial Times reported in April that it would miss ambitious revenue targets. BuzzFeed’s U.K. operation made a profit of £558,408 in 2015, according to its latest publicly-available financial accounts — up from £141,772 the previous year. Revenues were not disclosed. (Under U.K. company rules, the accounts of privately-owned companies are accessible to the public; however, if their turnover is less than £6.5 million, they are required only to disclose limited information.)

BuzzFeed’s audience in the U.K., at least, is growing. It attracts about 12 million unique visitors each month in the U.K., an eight-fold increase in four years, compared to the Guardian website’s 24 million and Daily Telegraph’s 22 million, according to figures BuzzFeed presented to the advertising audience on Monday. That doesn’t take into account its full reach, BuzzFeed argues, because much of its content is consumed directly on social media. More than 100 million people accessed the BuzzFeed U.K. Facebook page in the last month, it said, and about three-quarters of the audience are millennials.

Young people are interested in news, Gibson insists, as long as it’s packaged in a distinctive, original, accessible way. She worried during the Brexit campaign that the issue wouldn’t resonate with BuzzFeed’s readers. “Actually, it was just huge,” Gibson said.

In the run-up to the referendum, BuzzFeed hosted a live town hall debate on Facebook in which political leaders including Prime Minister David Cameron, UKIP leader Nigel Farage and Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon took questions from young voters. That Cameron agreed to appear in the debate, when Downing Street had rejected overtures from the likes of the Huffington Post and Daily Telegraph, was seen as confirmation of its growing credibility.